


Adversity Is But a Chance

by Deannie



Series: Cowboys and Zombies [7]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, M/M, Multi, Old West Zombie AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-17
Updated: 2016-05-17
Packaged: 2018-06-09 02:10:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6884983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My name is Ezra Standish, and I no longer know what I am....</p>
            </blockquote>





	Adversity Is But a Chance

My name is Ezra Standish, and I no longer know what I am. I was raised a gambler by trade and a confidence man by necessity—those things I still  _ am _ , but as to the rest…?

The Santa Fe Inn is three stories high. Plenty tall enough for me to see the streets below without being seen myself. It allows me the darkness that the gaming district would normally deny me, lit at ground level with its gas lamps and arc lights. It allows me to hide, for the moment, from what I may have become. All this time I have thought myself so lucky...

It’s been two months since that night, though I remember almost nothing of the first two weeks of that time. Amazing how a single evening can all but ruin what was… Well, hardly a perfect life, but mine.

No matter how good you are with a deck of cards, it cannot always pay your way, though in Kansas City, it can come close. I had been in the town for a couple of weeks, Mother and I having parted ways in St. Louis. Less amicably than we normally do, certainly, but she and I are like planets round the sun of greed. We will always line up again eventually.

Though perhaps not now.

I had met Julia and Jonathan in my cousin’s saloon. Jonathan was quite obvious in his preferences—more obvious than might have been healthy for him had his complete devotion to Julia not been equally as pronounced. Julia, for her part, was a loving wife and content to be adored in thought if not in deed. She was also not above sharing whomsoever she might fancy with her husband.

I am a good deal more subtle—and flexible—than dear Jonathan was, but the situation was one that seemed perfect for me. We dallied a few times, the three of us, and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. After a couple of weeks of our acquaintance, Jonathan came into the saloon on his own one afternoon, a singularly remarkable occurrence.

Julia was ill, he said. She’d been bit the day before by a horse they’d been looking to buy, and the wound was ailing her. She was sure she’d be just fine and hated having people hovering over her sickbed. She’d known the shine Jonathan had taken to me, and she suggested he indulge on his own, if he was willing.

We both were.

It was nearly dawn that next morning when Julia burst into the room Jonathan had hired for the night, her eyes clouded and rumy, her movements whip-fast and full of a disturbing hunger. She set upon Jonathan first, and I thought in my confusion that perhaps she’d drunk some bad medicine, or had some reaction to that bite. I thought she attacked out of fever-fueled passion or jealousy.

Until she bit so deeply into his neck as to kill him outright. I grabbed my gun up from the table then, but she was on me like a tiger. I shot her off, her own body silencing the discharge, just as she bit into my own chest. One bullet wasn’t enough for her, though, and another shot—to the head this time—was called for.

To my horror, somehow Jonathan still moved, his eyes roaming and seeking for something unseen as his lifeblood gushed. I admit to a gut-wrenching horror at the thought of dying slow from a wound like that. A bullet to the brain was the one mercy I could afford the poor man.

Shocked and in fear of what the police might say to a con man found in a room full of dead people, I stumbled back to my own quarters above my cousin Seamus’s saloon and collapsed, the bite burning, building a lethargy in me almost immediately. I awoke five days later, tied to the bed by all limbs, to find his wife Siobhan staring at me in fear, a loaded gun by her side. In my delirium, I’d become all but bestial.

I drifted in and out for days after that, always a wracking cough as my companion. And then I moved on as soon as I was able, having read the account of the strange double murder in the hotel where Jonathan and I had spent the night and having no desire to be brought in by the police. 

I also read more of the stories, fanciful and clearly overblown, about the plague that was sweeping across the southwest from California. Conflicting reports, ever more sensational, called it a wave of demonic possession, a plague, a curse by some wronged Indian squaw... It wasn’t until I reached El Paso that I learned the specifics of it. How it starts with a bite just like mine. Then a cough just like mine. How it ends with the afflicted as mindless as one of the zombies the Vodoun priests warned me of in New Orleans as a child, fit only for execution.

I heard no one recovered. No one escaped. I counted myself once more unique—this time in my survival, figuring that poor Julia must have been ill with it and Siobhan’s attentive care had been enough to keep me from the same fate. I was a fool, and now I sit here on this roof, like a gargoyle on an ancient church, and contemplate my existence.

Even now, weeks later, the cough lingers. The scar of that damned bite is as livid as the night Julia sank her teeth into me. The legacy of that one night seems never to end, and yet I am still myself, able to ply my trade and think my thoughts. But I am not the man I was. I’m not certain I’m the  _ human being _ that I was.

Two nights ago, I should have died. Yet here I sit, lying in wait for my murderers while the scar she gave me is the only mark on a body that lay broken and bleeding only 48 hours ago.

Perhaps I’m simply going mad…

> "Give us our money back, you damn cheater!” The man’s knife flashed before my eyes in the dank alleyway behind the Jaunty Feather. I hadn’t even cheated that night—I was tired, and didn’t want to end up fighting my way out of an alley, pursued by sore losers. God laughs, they say. Sometimes, he laughs at  _ us _ .
> 
> “Sir,” I said quietly, my arm muscles yearning to twitch and release my derringer, the only weapon left to me since they had relieved me of my others. “I assure you I did not cheat. What I won, I won fair and square.” To draw on them would have been foolhardy in the extreme—two bullets against four men…?
> 
> “No way anyone’s that good a player,” the man’s toothless companion grumbled. He was the worst player of all of them. He deserved what he got. “Give us our damn money and we might let you live.”
> 
> I looked into the eyes of each of the four inebriated men and was so sure that they would have no stomach for killing. The worst I’d get would be a drubbing it would take a week to recover from. “Perhaps we might come to some accommodation,” I offered, willing to forego that eventuality.
> 
> “How about, you give us  _ all _ your money,” one of the quiet ones in the back replied, stepping forward with a knife of his own and a glint in his eye that the dim light had failed to show me before. “And I don’t gut you like a fish.”
> 
> I triggered the rig on my arm and my derringer popped into my hand, flashing in the night. “I believe I’ve had better offers,” I told him, backing up warily as he and his companions froze. “Now, I will walk out of this alley and leave the four of you to your own thoughts.” I backed toward the main thoroughfare.
> 
> And ran into a chest twice the size of my own.
> 
> “Who said there were only four of us?” the deadly one with the knife murmured coldly. He approached confidently as hands the size of bear paws wrapped painfully around my upper arms from behind. “Thanks, Hiram,” he greeted the Neanderthal holding me, ripping the derringer out of my hand and pocketing it.
> 
> He easily divested me of my money clip and winnings from the night. Humiliating, yes. A financial blow, of course, though my winnings from the last few days were safely beneath a floorboard in my rented room. But it was the cost of doing business. Sometimes, you lose even when you win.
> 
> “I believe this concludes our transaction?” I asked quietly, just the right touch of chagrin and fear in my voice. It had often worked before, but my breath dried up as I realized he was not what I thought he was, damn him. The look in his eyes was murder and mayhem and all for me.
> 
> “Oh, I don’t think so, gambler,” he whispered, running the knife down my face without breaking the skin. The noise here in the gaming district is always cacophonous, even in the dead of night. No one would have heard me even if I had cried out for help.
> 
> “See, we’ve been watching you,” he told me. “You been doing pretty well for yourself, and I think, maybe… we want a piece of that, don’t we, boys?”
> 
> The men I’d all but forgotten about arrayed themselves behind him, sober as judges, and I took a deep breath. I had little choice but to fight my way out.
> 
> The steel tip of one of my boots found its way to his crotch and then slammed hard into the instep of the behemoth behind me. The brute let me go and I followed up with a fist that would have laid out a smaller man, but simply enraged him. The swing he took was clumsy, thankfully, and I ducked under it.
> 
> I was nearly to the alley’s mouth when an arm yanked me back hard enough to rattle my teeth. The first fist—I didn’t even see whose it was—struck my temple and I fell beneath a rain of blows such as I hadn’t felt since I’d last stayed with my Uncle and those murderous thugs he called my cousins.
> 
> I was wet with my own blood when a hand grabbed the back of my head and pulled me upright by my hair. The man with the knife smiled, and I knew then, finally, that my luck had run out.
> 
> Guess I had to die sometime.
> 
> “You’re lucky I don’t take my time with you, you son of a bitch,” he’d growled, breath fetid as he leaned in close. “I’ll just have to be happy with what I can get.”
> 
> The knife that slid into my gut hurt just the same way Julia’s bite had. Acid. Fire. Pain that was amplified by the bruises around it. I dimly felt spit hit my face as I was released to fall to the ground in a heap. They stripped my boots from me, crowing over the stash of bills they found, and left me to die.

And by all rights, I should have done just that.

I came to my senses hours later when the little Indian boy who cleaned the tavern in whose alley I lay, informed me that his boss would likely shoot me before he called the sheriff if I didn’t disappear. Hurting, bleeding, and aching which a fatigue I have not felt since Kansas City, I crawled back to my room, where I lay until this afternoon. 36 hours I do not remember in the least.

And when I rose, filthy in the clothes I’d been wearing since the beating, I stripped to find Julia’s bite mark just as it should be, and a smooth patch of pink, new skin where a fatal knife wound had surely been.

I do believe I stared for an hour before shaking myself to alertness. I dug out the floorboard, pulled out enough money to get the job done, and have spent the rest of the day planning my evening’s activities and refusing to think about what that new, pink skin must mean.

The men I seek are finally leaving the saloon, following another gambler to waylay. I head for the stairs at the back of the building and race down them, stopping to cough only once. Apparently whatever happened, it hasn’t cured me of that damned affliction.

“You cheated us, you son of a bitch!”

The voice in the alley is painfully familiar, and I peek in from the back, watching the four of them with their prey up against the wall. Where is their fifth, I wonder…?

“I wasn’t cheating you, fellas, honest!” The young gambler’s voice is high and terrified and I sigh at the conniving tone. He likely did cheat them. Not that it matters.

“Give us our money back, or we’ll gut you, kid.” The toothless one is menacing again. Have to put a stop to that.

“I don’t recall that going so well for you boys last time,” I point out, stepping into the alley enough to be lit by the arc light at the other end. The new guns I purchased this afternoon are not as comfortable as my old ones, but they’re solid in my grip and aimed at two out of four heads.

“You’re dead!” Toothless cries, frightened. It makes me smile wider. My mother once said that, when I wanted to, I could scare the devil with a smile.

“Care to join me?” I ask pleasantly. Toothless and one of the others immediately disappear, and I start looking around for the behemoth.

The knifeman and his remaining companion are staring, Knifeman clearly looking for signs of weakness from the blade in the gut he gave me. I stride forward, forcing down a cough.

“I believe it’s time you and your boys moved on to greener pastures,” I tell him. “After I am reunited with my property, of course.”

A sound behind me has me whirling, and I fire before I’m turned around, one gun still trained on Knifeman as I watch Behemoth fall dead at my back. I face forward again with a dark look. “Guns,” I bark. “Now.”

Each of them drops the weapons on him. My derringer is there, and the Colt, but this replacement Remington will have to do me, I suppose. I step forward once more, one gun in each face, but ready to shoot elsewhere should Toothless and his friend prove more courageous than they looked.

“My money, gentlemen?”

Knifeman withdraws a roll of bills from his pocket, and the young gambler takes the opportunity to bolt. Hopefully he’ll be smarter about his cheating in the future. The wad of bills is thrown to the ground by the guns, and Knifeman growls at me. “Should’ve stayed there to watch you bleed out, you damn Reb.”

“I’m not entirely sure that would have helped.” I grin as I retrieve my bankroll and weapons. “It takes more than a knife to keep me down.”

How much more? I have no idea. But perhaps Lady Luck truly has shone down on me.

As Mother says, adversity is but a chance to win at longer odds.

******   
the end


End file.
